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Showing posts from December, 2009

Did you see a sign on my door that says "Dead capacitor storage"?

With apologies to Quentin Tarantino... For a 10-year-old problem, the capacitor plague has been bizarrely present in my life recently. It started a couple of weeks ago when a coworker offered me an LCD TV that was "flaky" as scrap (my scraphound predilections are by now legend among those who know me). Being the upstanding gent I am, I pointed out that it was probably bad caps, and I found and replaced the buggers for him. A friend in Iowa sent me an e-mail, asking for help debugging a dead plasma he'd been gifted. He hasn't found bad caps yet but I'm fairly confident he will. My PC was dead the other morning, when I got to work. Guess why? A couple of months ago, I found a dead 17" LCD in the trash bin at the office. By now you should know how I fixed it. A tweep I follow posted this article this morning. This is fascinating for me in that it hits a number of points that people fail to understand about electronics: They wear out, but certain component